The Maine House took a step in the right direction this week, passing a bill that would send $2.5 million in emergency funding to keep county jails from shutting their doors before the end of June.
The next step would be the approval of L.D. 186, which would both get rid of the failed state Board of Corrections and provide funding to run the jails going forward. That would give corrections officials and the state the time to work out a fair way to share costs.
Maine needs, once and for all, to develop a rational corrections system that allows the movement of inmates from overcrowded facilities to those with space available. And it needs to work on joint programs that would address the revolving door of recidivism that jail becomes for too many – a phenomenon that drives up spending and makes successful rehabilitation so difficult.
That was the idea behind the Board of Corrections, a kind of forced marriage created in 2007 through negotiations between legislators and county officials. But it was never fully funded during the recession and in its aftermath. As in any marriage, a lack of money revealed other ways in which the partners were incompatible.
But dissolving the relationship and doing nothing else would just bring Maine back to where it was in 2006, when local property tax payers were struggling to meet escalating corrections costs.
This is the right time to secure state funding. Gov. LePage has proposed eliminating municipal revenue sharing, which he says would force cities and towns to look for ways to save money and work together. County governments are, by definition, regional entities with existing relationships with all municipalities. So counties are the logical place to broker sharing agreements over things like emergency dispatch centers and economic and community development. These are the kinds of projects that are already underway in Cumberland County, Maine’s largest.
But that’s a lot harder to do if counties are trying to make up for a loss of corrections revenue from the state. Counties have only one source of revenue: assessments made on town governments. A county that’s fighting to prevent a property tax hike is not going to be able to expand its scope of activity.
Prosecutors and judges are not driven by local needs. There is little that counties can do to reduce the number of inmates they must feed, house and provide with medical care.
For historical reasons that make little sense today, this has become a county responsibility. The state needs to play a role in making this collection of 15 lockups into a system that works.
Maine needs to meet its responsibility to contribute to corrections costs. If the state does its job, then the counties can do theirs.
Lawmakers should pass this funding bill, and then turn their attention to building a real statewide corrections system.
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